When Regret Still Lives in Your Heart

Regret is a funny thing.

Not funny as in “ha-ha,” but funny in the way that it has a habit of showing up when you least expect it. You can be having a perfectly normal day, drinking your coffee, minding your own business, and suddenly your brain decides to replay something you did twenty years ago. And just like that, there it is again. That old ache. That old mistake. That old “if only.”

When something happens to me that is especially painful, I have a tendency to pack up my emotions and place them in a lovely little box. Not just any box, mind you. My imaginary boxes are beautifully wrapped with elegant paper and a chic bow. Then I march them straight to my emotional closet and shove them as far into the back corner as possible.

Because obviously that’s what every emotionally healthy adult does.

My theory has always been simple: if I can hide it from myself, surely I can hide it from God.

It becomes a game of hide-and-seek. I hide the box. God finds the box.

Then, much to my annoyance, we open the box together. Every single time. And every single time, it turns out to be for my good. God gently heals whatever wounded me in the first place, and I walk away freer than before. Yet somehow I still complain because now I have to deal with the thing I worked so hard to avoid.

Thankfully, God is far more patient than I am.

Over the years, the Lord has taught me something important. I may be able to hide things from myself, but I cannot hide them from Him.

As Psalm 139 reminds us:

“O Lord, You have searched me and known me.” (Psalm 139:1)

He always knows where the boxes are. After more than forty years of hiding boxes and watching the Lord patiently unwrap them one by one, I honestly thought my emotional closet should be empty by now.

Apparently not.

There always seems to be one more box. Most of them eventually made their way out of the closet. Except one box never got stored away. Instead, I carried it everywhere.

I hauled it around like an overstuffed handbag. Or perhaps more accurately, like one of those ugly Christmas sweaters that should have been donated years ago—but for some reason I decided I deserved to wear every single day.

That box was labeled:

Regret.

Not regret over what someone else had done to me. Regret over what I had done. Regret over choices I wished I could undo. Regret over mistakes that carried consequences.

Regret over roads taken when I now wished I had chosen differently. Regret is a small word with an enormous impact. It follows us like a shadow. It whispers in our memories. It takes us back to old crossroads and invites us to imagine what might have happened if we had only turned left instead of right.

If only.

Those two words have carried a lot of weight in my life. The strange thing was that I had already confessed the sins connected to my regret. I had repented. I knew God had forgiven me. Yet the regret remained. Alongside it was something else. Disappointment.

The kind of disappointment that grows from hopes that never came to pass. The kind that comes when we build our plans around what we think is best, only to discover that life took a different direction.

One morning during prayer, the Lord tapped on the box I had been carrying around for years. He carefully removed the pretty paper and bow, and together we looked at what was inside. Frankly, I would have preferred not to. But God, in His kindness, had other plans.

He wasn’t interested in shaming me. He wanted to heal me. So I did what many of us do.

I immediately began explaining.

This is something I do quite well.

I explained and explained and then explained some more.

I explained why my regret was justified.

I explained why the consequences were my responsibility.

I explained why I ought to keep carrying it.

I presented what I considered a thorough and convincing argument. Unfortunately, it was a very long and thorough argument against myself.

The Lord listened patiently.

Then He said something I hadn’t expected.

“Give it to Me.”

I wish I could tell you I immediately let go. I did not. Because beneath the regret was something deeper.

A belief.

A very old one. It had lived in me for so long that it felt less like a belief and more like a fact.

It sounded something like this:

“You made your bed. Now lie in it.”

That phrase had settled into my heart years ago and quietly built a home there. Not just a home, either. At this point it had added a guest room, a garage, and probably an in-ground pool.

I believed forgiveness was available.

I also believed my regret, sorrow, and disappointment were mine to carry forever.

That morning, sitting before the Lord, I realized something that surprised me.

I trusted God to forgive me. What I did not trust was His desire to heal me.

I did not feel I had the right to ask Him to take away my pain.

I had accepted His pardon. I had never accepted His invitation to heal my heart.

Somewhere along the way, I had convinced myself that continuing to hurt was part of paying for what I had done.

But the Lord gently reminded me of something I needed to hear.

Consequences may remain.

Condemnation does not.

The debt had already been paid.

The punishment had already been carried.

And the regret I was clinging to was never something He had asked me to bear. Because while regret can teach us, it was never meant to become our identity. Jesus did not die so that we could spend the rest of our lives wearing our failures like badges of shame.

He died so that we could be forgiven.

He died so that we could be restored.

He died so that we could be free.

And perhaps the hardest part of healing is not believing God can forgive us. Perhaps the hardest part is believing that after God forgives us, He does not expect us to keep condemning ourselves.

And so, hesitantly, I handed Him my box of regret, along with the sorrow and disappointment I had carried for so many years. I walked into the freedom Jesus had been offering me all along.

The past did not disappear.

The consequences did not suddenly vanish.

But something else disappeared instead.

The belief that I was required to carry my pain forever as punishment.

I suspect many of us have a box like that. A box we have moved from shelf to shelf or carried with us for years. A box we have mistaken for part of our identity. A box we have learned to live around.

Perhaps yours contains regret.

Perhaps it contains disappointment.

Perhaps it contains something you have not named yet.

Whatever is inside, God already knows where it is. He always has. The God who forgives is also the God who restores. And sometimes restoration begins with something as simple—and as difficult—as opening our hands.

“As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us.” (Psalm 103:12)

Maybe today is the day to stop carrying what Jesus has already asked you to surrender.

After all, closets were never meant to be permanent storage for our pain.

With Hope and Love in Him,

“The face you make when you’ve been carrying emotional baggage for 40 years and Jesus says, ‘You can put that down now.’”